Hardee's
U.S. · 1,479 locations

Hardee's 1,479 locations are concentrated east of the Mississippi — particularly in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama — while Carl's Jr.'s roughly 1,000 units cluster in California, Texas, and the Mountain West. Combined, CKE covers most of the continental U.S. with minimal brand overlap. If you need a merged CKE master file or an overlap analysis in border states like Oklahoma and Missouri where both brands coexist, LocationLists can build that as a custom deliverable.

Extremely useful as a density anchor. Hardee's 1,479 locations — most of which sit on rural highways and in small towns under 50,000 population — form a skeleton map of where independent QSR traffic exists in the Southeast and Midwest. By plotting these alongside your existing stop list, you can identify clusters where adding nearby independent operators would reduce per-stop delivery cost. LocationLists can also run a proximity analysis against other QSR datasets in the catalog to quantify route overlap.

Hardee's over-indexes in counties with populations below 25,000 — markets where it often serves as the primary branded breakfast option. This makes the dataset a useful negative-space tool: if you're siting a new Bojangles' or Zaxby's, Hardee's presence signals existing QSR demand in a small trade area, while its absence may indicate a market too thin to support a drive-through concept. The latitude/longitude fields in this dataset allow direct import into GIS platforms like Esri or Placer.ai for trade-area scoring.

The dataset includes each unit's unique store ID (visible in the name field, e.g., 'Hardee's 1505548'), which you can cross-reference against state franchise disclosure records to group locations by franchisee. Clusters of 5–15 units within a single DMA often signal a mid-size operator — the sweet spot for roll-up acquisition. If you need us to enrich the file with estimated franchisee groupings or DMA-level unit counts, that's a custom project we handle regularly.

Hardee's 1,479 units give it roughly 75% of Waffle House's footprint and about double Bojangles' unit count, but with a wider geographic spread across the Midwest that neither competitor matches. The strategic insight is that Hardee's is the only national-scale biscuit-breakfast QSR brand with meaningful presence in states like Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri — markets where Waffle House and Bojangles' have little to no penetration. LocationLists can produce a custom overlap report between any two of these brands at the ZIP or county level.

Yes — combining this dataset with a Walmart or Dollar General location file lets you measure co-location patterns that reveal Hardee's site-selection logic. Historically, Hardee's franchisees have favored highway-adjacent pads near big-box anchors in rural markets. The geo-coordinates in this file support distance-matrix calculations in any GIS tool, and LocationLists can run a pre-built proximity analysis that flags every Hardee's within a specified radius of your chosen retail brand.